Acting!

Haven't laughed this hard for a good long while, and I need to blog this so I can "keep" this memory...

We have a family devotion time at night before bedtime. Sometimes we read, sometimes we sing, sometimes we act out stories, and sometimes we just pray, but we always do something, unless it is a church night, and then we come home and get ready for bed, assuming that we've already sent our thoughts and hearts heavenward for the night. ;o)

Well, tonight was "act out a story" night. John and I picked out stories for the kids to each act out (without talking though), and the rest of the kids had to guess what the story was. Aleksa acted out the story of Elijah running faster than the chariot, and then later of Samson carrying off the city gate, catching the foxes, eating the honey, etc. That one got a little confusing to watch, but you should have heard her go on and on and on and on telling us what she'd been acting out for us. ;o) Adam acted out King Saul going to the bathroom in the cave and David cutting off the hem of his robe, (you can use your imagination as to how he was inspired to act that one out!) (Groan!) Liana acted out *beautifully* the story of Ananias and Sapphira... how they kept back a portion of the money from the land they'd sold, and told the apostles that they'd given them the entire sum. Liana even acted out laying the money at the apostles' feet, which I'd almost forgot about myself. She acted out the grave-diggers even! It was hilarious watching her "heave" the heavy dirt with her shovel!

We definitely have some actors and actresses in the family! The kids LOVE when we do this, though it takes them several more minutes than usual to calm down enough to sleep! But it sure makes those stories stick better, being able to act them out!

Speaking of acting! I need to take a video sometime (after I clear off my harddrive, perhaps!) of the kids acting out the last few paragraphs of Patrick Henry's "Give me Liberty" speech. Complete with acted-out stab-in-the-heart death scene at the end. lol! (We're memorizing that as part of their history lessons). I definitely must post a video of that sometime soon. I'll let 'em polish it up a bit, and tell 'em that whoever gets it "down pat" first will have the honor of it being put online. They're drama queens, those girls. While this stuff comes really easily for the girls, Adam has struggled a bit because of his speech/language difficulty. I think this project has really helped him though, to be more careful with his articulation, etc. We've seen some good progress since we've started doing these more lengthy memorized passages. We've also seen some awesome progress with him in math. We backed him up recently to make sure he was "getting" things, and his last three tests have been all A's. Today's was a 100% even! Now, he's definitely not on grade level with his math, but when I think of how hard he has worked to get to where he is, it makes me teary! He couldn't count to 14 when he first came home. Numbers meant nothing to him. He couldn't even remember how old he was. We would practice and practice him saying "I'm nine years old." He'd always say, "seven" or "six" or "ten" or whatever. Not even when we did it in Russian was it sticking. And it took weeks and months to get him to be able to count to 25 or 50. Dot-to-dots were KILLERS for him. He just couldn't do even the simple ones. (Remember?! Oh, how I worried!) Then there was getting him to count by twos or fives! I remember having worked with him for weeks and weeks on counting by twos, and then I realized that he had unplugged "regular" counting. He could then count by two's but had forgotten counting by one's. Very. Frustrating. Ugh... Hours and hours and hours and hours and hours later, he's doing very well. It's still hard, and he's well below grade-level, but he's plugging along, and (shhhhh, don't tell him I think so), but I think he's actually enjoying his math right now!

(Sorry, can't make a decent ending right now - baby crying, must go!)